• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5734 0

days in speculation and dispute could scarcely expect to survive. Matthew was anxious to know Adamson’s thoughts, to know whether he had consciously decided to behave in the way he did. But he found it difficult to corner Adamson and even more difficult to get him to say what he thought about anything. He would merely answer with a smile or a shrug when Matthew tried to sound him out on some political question. Once he admitted reluctantly in reply to Matthew’s question that, after the war, if he got back to Britain, he would vote for a Labour Government ‘to change all this’ and he gestured vaguely with a stick at the smouldering warehouses around them. After a moment’s silent reflection he added: ‘I read somewhere that the boatman who rowed King William back across the river after the Battle of the Boyne is supposed to have asked the King which side won … To which the King replied: “What’s it to you? You’ll still be a boatman.”’ Matthew had to be satisfied with this.

In the course of the past few days Adamson had hurt his foot and now limped rather, but he still managed to convey the impression that he was merely out for a stroll among the burning buildings; his casual air was increased by the fact that he had taken to carrying a walking stick he had picked up somewhere. Once Matthew came upon him unexpectedly. Not far from one of the dock gates there was a sad little parcel of tattered clothing and personal odds and ends, abandoned by someone unable to carry them in the stampede to reach one of the last ships to leave. Other similarly abandoned suitcases had in the meantime vanished or been rifled of their contents. Now Adamson, leaning on his stick, was contemplating a battered old hairbrush with bristles splayed by use, a sponge-bag, a couple of books including a child’s picture-book, what might have been a cotton dress or apron and several other indeterminate pieces of cloth or clothing. He continued to gaze at these things for a moment with raised eyebrows and a grim expression on his face; then he limped on, swiping with his stick at a tennis ball he saw in the gutter with a shoe and one or two other things. The dog, which had come back to see what was the matter, went racing off again to seek out more fires. Matthew would remember for a long time to come that bitter, ironic expression he had glimpsed on Adamson’s face as he limped away down the empty street after the dog which had already disappeared into the rolling smoke.

But already the Mayfair unit had gained so much experience that its members depended less and less on Adamson’s advice and directions. The Major himself had become a hardened fireman and no longer would have dreamed of taking the risks he had taken in the beginning. Not that fire-fighting had become any less dangerous. Quite apart from the heavy carpet-bombing raids by gigantic formations of bombers (still in multiples of twenty-seven) which continued and intensified in the first week of February, now lone fighter-aircraft would appear suddenly out of nowhere, zooming up and down the main thoroughfares of the city and machine-gunning anything that moved, even rickshaws or Cold Storage ‘stop-me-and-buy-one’ tricycles … one day they passed an overturned tricycle with a Chinese youth beside it, his brains spilling into a pool of milk or ice-cream in the road. Anywhere, coming and going to fires, you might suddenly have come upon a row of bodies stretched out on the pavement following the appearance of one of these aircraft.

The city of Singapore which, in unison with the rise of Blackett and Webb, had grown from a small settlement into the greatest trading port of the Far East had been the home of something over half a million people in peacetime. Now in the space of a few weeks the population had suddenly doubled to over a million as refugees poured across the Causeway from up-country. By the time a hole had at last been blown in the Causeway and the flow of refugees had dried up, the Island, and Singapore Town in particular, was swarming with people who had nowhere to go. From now on, almost